December 08, 2008

BlogRize Relaunches After Hiatus With Blog-Based Communities

On April 7th, Jesse Spaulding launched a new site called BlogRize, which was looking to create small communities centered around blogs, where readers of popular blogs, from ReadWriteWeb to CenterNetworks to this one, could interact with the blog's content and its fellow readers. (See: BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers) But after a slower than expected start, Jesse pulled the site down, and worked diligently for its replacement, which debuts today, offering new features that help you find your activity on other sites, as well as finding out how frequently individual posts have been linked to throughout the Web.

A Recent Popular Post, Tracked by BlogRize

Notes On Google Reader Shares Get Into BlogRize

As Jesse wrote me in an e-mail last week, "The fundamental nature of having communities built around individual blogs is unchanged." But it is definitely operating at a higher level. BlogRize is now following about 10,000 different blogs, and tracks links between each blog, which factors into posts' ranking algorithm. Much like Technorati, Google and Techmeme operate on the guise of frequently-linked posts having higher quality, BlogRize does the same.

But beyond blogs, BlogRize also allows you to pull in your Google Reader shared items and comments, so your comments can be attached to their original sources. If I, for instance, share an item with a note, that note becomes part of my commenting history. As Jesse also wrote, "If your friend makes a comment on one of the stories on the homepage this comment will display in-line on the homepage for easy consumption. The comment only displays once though and for the next page load its gone. All your friends comments can still be seen under friends activity page.)"

BlogRize now describes itself as bringing "today's most interesting web content by harnessing the collective intelligence of communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs." It's that collective intelligence that has led to the popularity of sites like Techmeme, Digg, ReadBurner and others, but also offers visitors the option to hone in on those blog communities they are part of.

For example, you can join BlogRize and be automatically added to the louisgray.com community here: http://www.blogrize.com/join/louisgray.com. And if you're a blogger, just change the domain name to your own blog, and start building a community today.

Once on BlogRize, you can join new communities, follow fellow users, make comments and vote things up, as you can with other social services. So check out the new BlogRize and see how Jesse's updated the site.